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Papers on Joyce 13 (2007): 157-159 NEWS The James Joyce Graduate Conference at the Università Romana Tre On the occasion of Joyce’s one hundred twenty-sixth birthday, a two-day James Joyce Graduate conference, organized by the James Joyce Italian Foundation , was held at the Università Roma Tre, on February 1-2, 2008. The event was entirely devoted to the presentation of research work on Joyce carried out by young scholars from different countries. The conference was held under the auspices of Giorgio Napolitano, President of the Republic of Italy, who sent a note to Franca Ruggieri, President of the Foundation, in which he wished all success to the speakers taking part in the meeting. He also showed his own appreciation of the valuable efforts of established academics in sponsoring the work of their junior colleagues. The scientific committee was composed of Franca Ruggieri, John McCourt and Enrico Terrinoni. Thirty-two speakers from nineteen universities around the world were invited to take part in the conference. There were delegates from Italy, US, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, France, Iran, UK, and Spain. The chairs and respondents in the four/five-speakers parallel panels were academics from the universities of Bologna-Forlì, Florence, Turin, Roma Tre, Lion, York, Roma La Sapienza, Vigo, Trieste, Perugia (Univ. for Foreigners), Radford, and Milan. One of the panels was chaired by Fritz Senn, President of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Among the chairs and respondents were Jacques Aubert, Rosa Maria Bosinelli, Carla Marengo, Paola Pugliatti, Derek Attridge, Caroline Patey, Cristina Giorcelli, Teresa Caneda, and Jolanta Wawrzycka. The conference was opened by brief introductory speeches given by representatives of the Faculty of Letters and the Comparative Literature Department, Università Roma Tre. Then the President of the University, Guido Fabiani, expressed his gratitude to the organizers for their commitment to encouraging the work of young scholars who are, in his words, “the real hope of our future.” There followed the reading of a message sent by Giorgio Melchiori, honorary member of the Foundation, Emeritus Professor at Roma Tre, NEWS: JAMES JOYCE GRADUATE CONFERENCE founding father of Joyce scholarship in Italy, and founder and general editor of the journal Joyce Studies in Italy , currently edited by Franca Ruggieri. Soon after a short note of appreciation and best wishes from the Ambassador of Ireland, Sean O’Huiginn, Franca Ruggieri formally opened the conference and welcomed the participants. She stressed that the academic programme testified to the actual possibility of a promising cultural exchange between the various experts in Joyce studies in an intercultural and European dimension. This was said to be the real force that still has the power to move young scholars towards the application of such significant knowledge to human existence. The first speaker was Derek Attridge, “Leverhulme Research Professor” and Chair of English at the University of York. His was a complex and illuminating lecture. The title “Signature and Counter-signature: Derrida Reads Ulysses ” refers to Attridge’s long- standing research interest in the work of the French philosopher. After some funny remarks on a three-hour lecture given by Derrida at a Joyce Symposium held in Frankfurt in the ’90s —some of the speakers were also present in Rome— he focused on the importance of the “signature” and “counter-signature” in the production and reception of Joycean textuality, seen as modalities of a plural hermeneutics. By touching skillfully on the notions of singularity and duality of signification in Ulysses , and therefore the inevitable “uniqueness” of all possible exegeses, Attridge referred to Derrida’s major essay on Joyce “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” There the great book is presented as a text which anticipates its own criticism, and prefigures an essential impossibility of being dealt with, in any absolute and definitive way. Such a promising start was followed by a series of parallel panels. The morning sessions were devoted to themes such as Intermedial Joyce and Drama and Voice . Graduate students had the opportunity to introduce their research to their senior colleagues, on subjects as diverse as colour, voice, and cinema, but also on the “presence” of Wagner, Yeats and Beckett in the work of Joyce. In the afternoon, following a meeting of the members of the James Joyce Italian Foundation , panel sessions on Ulysses , intertextuality, and Joyce’s relationship with his contemporaries were held. In the evening, all speakers and participants were invited to a reception hosted by the Irish Ambassador to Italy at his residence near the Circus Maximus. Before the actual buffet dinner, John McCourt launched several books on Joyce and Irish literature written and/or edited by Italian scholars. These included Giorgio Melchiori’s Le foglie ; the most recent issues of Joyce Studies in Italy ; the volumes of the Piccola Biblioteca Joyciana series, edited by Franca Ruggieri; the IRIC - Internationalist 158 NEWS: JAMES JOYCE GRADUATE CONFERENCE Review of Irish Culture , edited by Andrea Binelli, Enrico Terrinoni, and Brian Thomson; the Joyciana series, edited by Renzo S. Crivelli and Claudia Corti; La letteratura irlandese contemporanea, edited by Renzo Crivelli; Joyce in Trieste, edited by Geert Lernout, Sebastian Knowles, and John McCourt; and Joycean Murmoirs , edited by Fritz Senn and Christine O’Neill. During the following morning some very interesting panels on Joyce and Biography and Joycean Language and Translation gave the audience many a new insight into the most recent trends of Joyce scholarship. The themes that were discussed included Virginia Woolf and her relationship with Joyce, Joyce’s autobiographical writings and letters, Lawrence Venuti’s approach to translation in Joyce’s texts, and the Portrait , seen both as an autobiographical work and as a book written in the “language of creation.” After a much deserved coffee break, the conference was concluded by Umberto Eco, whose stimulating talk focused on “Joyce’s misfortunes in Italy.” Punning on Giovanni Cianci’s valuable volume on the “fortune” of Joyce in Italy, Eco revisited many negative responses to Joyce’s work published in Italian newspapers and journals during the fascist regime. They were all mainly narrow-minded, conservative and reactionary, if not clearly protectionist of the “indigenous” culture, and skeptical of whatever formal innovation could come from a European and internationalist context. This went as far as saying of Joyce’s works that “[t]he Jewish insect in this novelist has destroyed everything.” Another comment went that “[h]is clownish and paltry jests against Rome and the Papacy would be less annoying if we did not see in them a latent attempt to seduce the children of Israel.” Such a tendency often resulted in curiously depicting Joyce —an Irish Catholic, albeit an apostate— as a “subtle Jew.” But, as Eco himself seemed to suggest, the fascists were not the most forward-looking among intellectuals —if the expression “fascist intellectual” has any meaning at all, besides being a fine oxymoron. While professor Eco was lecturing, the translation of his paper by Enrico Terrinoni and John McCourt was screened, for the joy of non-Italian-speaking members of the audience. Overall, the conference was the occasion for a fruitful encounter among established and emerging scholars working in the area of Joyce studies. The organization and distribution in parallel panels, which featured the presence of experts, was a fortunate choice. It encouraged the possibility of a stimulating dialogue between older and younger generations of Joyce scholars, and allowed a cultural exchange which will hopefully be the rationale of the future conferences and symposia on the works of James Joyce. Enrico Terrinoni 159 .

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